International Conference to be held at the University of Copenhagen, 8-10 November 2007

Literature by migrants - those not at home where they write - foregrounds many questions concerning cultural and linguistic identity, not least the relationships between identity, language and territory. Fundamentally, such literature challenges the categories according to which literary disciplines have traditionally (that is, since the late nineteenth century) organised their research.

This conference on "Migration and Literature in Contemporary Europe" aims to bring together scholars researching within this field and to establish or negotiate the sense of a shared discipline with common paradigms and problematics. By gathering scholars who work within different territorial and linguistic contexts the conference aims to overcome the limits set by national paradigms; to challenge conventional understandings of the relation between sending and receiving cultures; to highlight similarities and differences between and within the different national contexts; and, through this comparative, interdisciplinary and transnational approach, to work towards a provisional outline of the present state and potential development of literary migration studies.

The conference will focus on contemporary European literature in order to investigate, primarily, the nexus between migration, nation, literature, cultural loyalties and social and personal identities. Within the last thirty years Europe has undergone a radical change: the European Union has shown itself to be a force at both supranational and regional (sub-national) levels. The idea of the nation-state - one territory, one people, one language, one faith, one currency - is no longer coherent in practice, nor is it self-evidently desirable. Simultaneously, Europe as an enduring name and symbol of cultural value is destabilized. The recent and potential accession to the EU of new member states, including Turkey, has brought out the Western European bias of the old idea of 'Europe'; and, in consequence of large movements of population both into and away from European nations, the residents of Europe now present highly complex social, cultural and linguistics cartographies. Traditional territorial mapping, with its political and natural boundaries and features, is increasingly inadequate as a means of understanding Europe today. So also is the traditional way of studying European literature in terms of distinct languages and national traditions.

The conference wishes to explore literature by migrants, and by the children of migrants, as well as literature written by non-migrants that deals with migration as a theme; and to investigate whether and how migration affects national canons, national literary history and national culture in a broad sense. The conference will also welcome papers on other forms of cultural expression: music, the visual and performing arts, and media and language in general. There will also be space for interdisciplinary papers which situate the phenomenon of migration within other discourses, psychological or philosophical, historical or geographical, anthropological or sociological.

The conference invites papers that deal with themes and questions within the following fields:

- Concepts of place and location: exile, diaspora, migration and nomadism, urban vs. rural landscapes; constructions of 'home' and 'homeland'.

- Methods and interdisciplinarity: how is migration literature received and treated by national philologies, and by comparative literature, postcolonial studies and other developments in literary and cultural studies?

- Themes: identity, cultural belonging, memory, gender, religion, the colonial past of Europe (not least that of Denmark and its former colonies in West Africa and the Caribbean, and its continuing colonial role in Greenland).

- Translation studies: what might translation studies contribute to our understanding of migration literature, and what impact might the latter have on our understanding of the nature and role of translation and its conventional concepts of 'source' and 'target' languages.

Applications by e-mail -- containing name, institutional address, e-mail address, short CV and 300 word abstract of proposed paper -- should be sent no later than June 30 2007 to:

grundtvig@hum.ku.dk

The conference is organized by the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies (http://www.english.engerom.ku.dk) and the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen (http://kunstogkulturvidenskab.ku.dk); it is sponsored by 'Europe in Transition', one of the University of Copenhagen's interdisciplinary and faculty-wide research priority areas (http://www.ku.dk/priority/europe).